I look up as Ramsay bangs out the back door, a sympathetic smile already on his face. “Don’t,” I say, but relief and gratitude wash over me the minute I see what’s in his hand. “Oh, shit. Ramsay. You’re my hero.”
“Contraband.” He wiggles the donuts, grinning, and rips open the pack. “Just for you.”
“I mean it, you’re my hero.” I take one of the donuts, full of strawberry jelly and absolutely off-limits for ourhealth-consciousoffice. We bump the pastries together and take a bite in tandem. I groan, sagging against the wall in pleasure. “God, that’s fucking good.”
“It should be illegal to enjoy junk food as much you do.”
I give him a grin. Ramsay and I have been friends since we both started here three years ago. He had my back during the pregnancy, during maternity leave. He’d show up with red wine and a handful of DVDs and for a minute, I’d forget just how alone I was.
Back then he was a lifeline. Now that my mom’s back in town and taking care of the kids most of the time, his position in my life is less…utilitarian. And he gets this look in his eyes, sometimes, that makes me wonder if he hasn’t been waiting—for me to ask him something or tell him something, for me to make some kind of confession I never could.That space in my heart is still taken.
“So,” he says, leaning against the wall beside me. He has nice blond curls and broad shoulders and a square jaw, and even though I don’t mean to, I’ve noticed that he’s been working out the last few months.For me?“What’s the verdict with the harpy?”
I shake my head. The tears stopped about three minutes after they started. It’s always like that when something happens, or hits me, or I get overwhelmed. I get out into the sharp cold air and feel awoken. It’s a deep kind of awakeness, a kind that makes me feel like, unwittingly, I’m always half-asleep. It makes me want to walk out of this office and never walk back in.
What do you expect, Lexie? You’re not like them.Old words, worn smooth by time. Spoken in his voice, long before the first—theonly—time we slept together. I hear myself, naïve, over-confident, totally taken with this guy who’s completely out of my reach:I’m your little sister’s best friend. This memory is deeply buried, dangerous and surprisingly sharp, like a rusted knife. It’s not one I let myself revisit often.
In it, I’m walking down the train tracks toward home, and Liam is walking with me. He stays back about ten feet, and moves with this quiet, humble confidence, hands in his pockets, hood drawn up. From middle school to adulthood I spent more than half my time at their place. It was their dad’s and they sold it when he died a few years back, but I loved it. My house was small, sanitized, with a crisp square lawn and a mother who was almost never home, and the ghost of the man who’d left her before I was born.
It was lonely, and Liam knew that, and he always took pains to make sure I was looked after. I told myself it was thebrotherlything to do. He was just being a man, a young man, acting with respect and responsibility.
But in this memory I’m eighteen and he’s twenty-two, and that brotherly line has begun to blur. I’m telling him I want to leave town, start a life somewhere else, maybe become a writer and live in a big city and build houses on my dreams.
I don’t feel like I fit in here, I’m saying.
And he looks at me with this small sharp smile.What do you expect, Lexie? You’re not like them.
I’m just like them, I say, in response to the comment. And in response to the smile, to the rest, which is unspoken:I’m your little sister’s best friend.
We walk the rest of the way to my house in silence. He walks me in, because he always does, like he’s casing the place for hidden threats. When he passes by the door he touches one palm to my hip, smooth and easy, like we’ve done it a thousand times before. But it sucks the breath out of my lungs; the familiarity, the boldness of it, the confirmation.
Then he gives me that razor-smile, and he’s gone.
“Lexie.Lexie.”
I snap back to reality, blinking hard. Ramsay is staring at me with a stricken smile, his hand on my shoulder. The donut is still in my hand, only one perfect bite taken. “Shit,” I say, shaking my head and straightening up. “Sorry.”
“Where’d you go?”
“Nowhere good,” I say honestly, finishing the rest of the donut and licking powder from my fingers. Ramsay watches, something like suspicion in his eyes. “What?”
He fidgets with the empty package, then leans back against the wall. He looks across the lot where, past all our dew-wet cars, lies an expanse of dead yellow grass that stretches on as far as the eye can see.Wild.
“I saw the news,” he says softly. “I mean, I saw. That he got out.”
Oh. Shit.“Ramsay, no one else knows about him. No one here, not my mom, not even his sister—”
“I know. I know.” He bumps my arm with his. “Your secret’s safe with me.”
“I know.” I do, I really do. I trust Ramsay, it’s just…men get jealous. And jealous men are stupid men. I rub my arms and look out at the fields. A hawk is turning in lazy, slow circles above a spill of trees. “Yeah, I guess he’s been on my mind.”
“He’s an asshole.”
“Yeah, but…”But he was my first.“Nothing.”
Ramsay studies me, then shakes his head. “Lexie, no. No. You arenotgetting wrapped up with him again. Tell me you’re not even thinking about it. He left you withtriplets—”
“He didn’t know!”
